Error "Your system has run out of application memory" message
Why am I getting this message? Started after upgrading to Tahoe. What's the best solution?
MacBook Air, macOS 26.0
This has been an issue being reported by multiple people on this forum. I have encountered this problem twice now after upgrading to Tahoe a week or so ago (clean install & migration with nearly 100GB of Free storage space). Tonight when it occurred I was not experiencing any performance issues until the pop-up alert occurred showing my browser consuming 70GB of memory, plus I thought some of the other listed apps were using more memory than they should have been. The only way out was to Force Quit everything & reboot.
I know I am overloading my system a bit at times & I need to restart my browser a bit more often, but this extreme pausing of all apps has never occurred before on any older versions of macOS. I think maybe I encountered the memory issues twice on Ventura, but I just quit a couple of apps & resumed using the computer normally. I have a very simple setup with only the most essential apps installed for my job.
Unfortunately many other people have a lot of unnecessary junk installed on their systems so it is hard to say how bad the memory issues are in Tahoe. While I've seen numerous reports, they have been somewhat limited especially since some of them likely involve faulty software. Chances are they are like me and are pushing their memory utilization too far, but Tahoe isn't handling it as well as older versions of macOS did.
It seems like there is some sort of bug with how Tahoe is handling memory issues and is waiting too long to alert the user to a problem. I've never liked how Apple handles memory in macOS.....I have more issues in macOS than I ever had with Linux even when I was overloading it as well (easy to do when there is only 4GB of RAM)....probably because you sense a memory issue before it becomes critical whereas macOS waits until the system is unusable before alerting the user. Something definitely has changed in Tahoe in respect to how it handles memory. Luckily I'm only testing Tahoe at the moment deciding if I will keep it or stay on the older OS.
